[imagesource:here]

Commercial space flight seemed like the stuff of science fiction until Elon Musk became involved.

Before SpaceX’s first manned mission on the Falcon 9 Crew Dragon, the United States hadn’t even launched its own spacecraft since 2011 and had been training astronauts and transporting them to the International Space Station (ISS) on Russia’s Soyuz spacecraft.

Now, more historic events are on the horizon, including an upcoming, unique journey into orbit.

Billionaire tech entrepreneur Jared Isaacman will head up the first-ever all-private crewed orbital mission in history.

Isaacman is an accomplished pilot who will command the four-person Inspiration4 mission aboard a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule (named Resilience), later this year.

Two of the three remaining seats on the capsule were donated to St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. One of those has gone to an employee, and according to Isaacman, “she’s looking forward to the launch as much as me”.

The mystery employee has now been identified, per The Verge, as Hayley Arceneaux, a physician’s assistant at St. Jude.

Image: Hayley Arceneaux, St.Jude

She was diagnosed with bone cancer when she was 10, and was treated at St. Jude. She had to have some of the bones in her left leg replaced with titanium as part of her treatment.

She now works with children who are being treated for lymphoma and leukaemia.

Arceneaux’s participation in the Inspiration4 mission is significant for a number of reasons. At 29, she’ll be the youngest American to go into space and the first person with a prosthetic body part.

The award for the youngest person ever to leave Earth goes to Gherman Titov, a cosmonaut (Russian astronaut) who was 25 when he went into orbit.

The remaining two spots will be decided via a raffle hosted as a fundraising initiative by St. Jude, and a contest sponsored by Isaacman.

It’s all summed up in this ad that he made for the Super Bowl:

It’s a pity that the competition is confined to the US.

[source:verge]